Women Are Closing the Infidelity Gap

Screw the glass ceiling, because women are closing the gap on infidelity. According to information from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, as of 2010, 14.7 percent of women admitted to having extramarital affairs—a 40 percent increase over the last two decades. Meanwhile, the percentage of men remained the same at 21 percent.

According to Auburn University sociologist Yanyi Djamba, men remain "more likely to cheat" than women, but the presence of social media and the fact that gainfully employed women will lose less from divorce than their dependent counterparts can be credited for this increase in their infidelity.

The common motive for infidelity was a lack of satisfaction with marriage. The survey showed that one out of every four men described their marriages as "not very happy,” which is two times the number of women who felt the same way.

Daniel Bergman, who wrote What Do Women Want?, argued that cultural expectations stopped women from having affairs in the past. Those expectations have obviously changed.